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Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Design Information Overload

“Not only is the quantity of information itself by now beyond the reach of single designers, but the various specialists who retail it are narrow and unfamiliar with the form-makes' peculiar problems, so that it is never clear quite how the designer should best consult them.”

Random Information Design

“The average designer scans whatever information he happens on, consults a consultant now and then when faced by extra-special difficulties, and introduces randomly selected information into forms otherwise dreamt up in the artist's studio of his mind.”

Flimsy Solution Conviction

“In the case of a real design problem, even our conviction that there is such a thing as fit to be achieved is curiously flimsy and insubstantial. We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed, and a context which we cannot properly describe. The only reason we have for thinking that there must be some kind of fit to be achieved between them is that we can detect incongruities, or negative instances of it.”

Time for Equilibrium

“Misfit provides an incentive to change; good fit provides none. In theory the process is eventually bound to reach the equilibrium of well-fitting forms. However, for the fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. The process must be able to achieve equilibrium before the next culture change upsets it again... The direct response is the feedback of the process. If the process is to maintain the good fit ... while the culture drifts, it needs a feedback sensitive enough to take action the moment that one of the potential failures actually occurs.”

Aristotle

Four Causes

“Plainly, then, these are the causes, and this is how many they are. They are four, and the student of nature should know them all, and it will be his method, when stating on account of what, to get back to them all: the matter, the form, the thing which effects the change, and what the thing is for.”'
  • Source: Aristotle, From Physics, Book II, Part 7, 198a21-26. As quoted in Stephen Everson, 'Aristotle on the Foundations of the State', Political Studies (1988), 36, 89-101. Reprinted in Lloyd P. Gerson (ed.), Aristotle: Politics, Rhetoric and Aesthetics (1999), 74.

F_Terry_Baker

Code Library

“The most important of these is a development support library which encourages the visibility and manageability of the product, as well as reduces clerical effort on the part of the programmers. The library is typically maintained and operated by a programming librarian who serves to control the programming assets and to provide the necessary services for both programmers and management. As a result of its use, the entire project is maintained in a centralized, up-to-date, visible form which makes its status immediately apparent to code-competent software managers and makes it possible for programmers to answer their questions directly without relying on others.”
  • Source: Baker, F. T. (1975). Software Management Through Improved Programming Technology. ACM ’75: Proceedings of the 1975 Annual Conference, 286–287. https://doi.org/10.1145/800181.810346

Claude_Bernard

Hypothesis Theory Reason

“A scientific hypothesis is merely a scientific idea, preconceived or pre-visioned. A theory is merely a scientific idea controlled by experiment. Reasoning merely gives a form to our ideas, so that everything, first and last, leads back to an idea.”
  • Source: From the book "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine" written by Claude Bernard published in French in 1865 as "Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale". Translated to English by Henry Copley Greene in 1927 and republished by Henry Shuman, Inc. in 1949. Chapter I, page 26. Available online at https://archive.org/details/b21270557 retrieved 2024.

Anthony_Burgess

Art Begins With Craft

“Art begins with craft, and there is no art until a craft has been mastered. You can't create unless you're willing to subordinate the creative impulse to the construction of a form. But the learning of a craft takes time, and we all think we're entitled to short cuts. Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.”
  • Source: Anthony Burgess (1986). But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop, and Other Writings, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Winston Churchill

Democracy

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
  • Source: Winston Churchill. Speech delivered 1947-11-11 to the U.K. House of Commons.

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Religion

“Religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers... The form in which religions have presented their truths — myths, revelations, holy texts — no longer compels belief in an era of scientific rationality.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Shields of Culture”, page 14. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Epictetus

Disturbing Things

“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.”
  • Source: The words of Epictetus from the book “The Enchiridion” as recorded by his student Arrian in the second century. Verse 5.

David_Epstein

Haiku

“Haiku, the three-line poem made by alternating lines of five, seven, and five syllables... in the seventeenth century, a student of Zen named Matsuo Bashō... made it into its own serious form, imbued with Zen principles. Not only were the words spare, but the ethos was as well... It prompted poets to pause and look mindfully at the world around them... This minuscule problem space is known around the world for its ability to turn anyone, from kindergartener to adult, into a probing wordsmith in an instant. Look around you; try it. The form's scarcity will immediately ignite an exploration of new linguistic possibilities in your mind.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 68. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

The Box

“Sometimes new ideas require entirely new forms. It’s not that we need to ‘think outside the box,’ so to speak, as much as we need to craft a new box, for new ideas. Constraints can help with that.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 70. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Haiku Way

“Haiku finds depth in the simple, and creativity in constraints that block the path of least resistance... Haiku is small, so you can try easily and iterate quickly. It is in present tense, so it forces you to be in the moment... Haiku is the simplest example of a helpful constraint... It is not a form, it is a way — an attitude. It is a way of being, of eagerly accepting unnecessary obstacles because of where they can lead.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 233. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Robert_Heinlein

Scientific Method

“There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.”.
  • Source: Written by Robert A. Heinlein in the short story “Life-Line” originally published in the 1939-08 edition of “Astounding Science Fiction” magazine, page 83. Character: Dr. Pinero. Retrieved 2024-05-05 from https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AST.htm.

Hans_Hüttel

Chatbots and Programmers

“Even if chatbots should become a useful tool for programmers, their existence cannot mean the end of programming. It may well be the case that this combination of a built-in repository of code examples and the ability to easily retrieve code examples based on it can be used for generating ideas and for forms of ‘pair programming’.”
  • Source: Written by Hans Hüttel in the journal article entitled “On Program Synthesis and Large Language Models”, in Communications of the ACM, volume 68, number 1, 2025-01. DOI:10.1145/3680410.

Carl_Jung

Unknown Potential

“Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. I therefore asked myself whether this possibility of outgrowing, that is, further psychic development, was not the normal thing, and therefore remaining stuck in a conflict was what was pathological. Everyone must possess that higher level, at least in embryonic form, and in favorable circumstances must be able to develop this possibility.”

Spirit and Matter

“Spirit and matter may well be forms of one and the same transcendental being. For instance, the Tantrists, with as much right, say that matter is nothing other than the concreteness of God’s thoughts.”
  • Source: Written by Carl Jung in the book “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”. Published in London, UK by Routledge. Published 1991. Page 212.

John_von_Neumann

Language Historical

“It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident... It is only reasonable to assume that logics and mathematics are similarly historical, accidental forms of expression.”
  • Source: John von Neumann. (1958). The Computer and the Brain (1st ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Part 2, page 81.

J_Robert_Oppenheimer

World Would Not Be the Same

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
  • Source: Oppenheimer is quoting from the 1944 Prabhavananda and Isherwood translation of the Bhagavad Gita. The line quoted is spoken by Krishna, one of the major avatars of Vishnu; some assert that the passage would be better translated "I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds." online video at atomicarchive.com<nowiki>. Also an interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed, NBC White Paper; atomicarchive.com

Steven_Pinker

Two Modes of Thinking

“People think in two modes. They can form fuzzy stereotypes by uninsightfully soaking up correlations among properties, taking advantage of the fact that things in the world tend to fall into clusters (things that bark also bite and lift their legs at hydrants). But people can also create systems of rules — intuitive theories — that define categories in terms of the rules that apply to them, and that treat all the members of the category equally.”
  • Source: Steven Pinker (1997). How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06973-0; eISBN 978-0-393-06973-0. Chapter 2 Section: Connectoplasm.

Frank_H_T_Rhodes

Kettle Boiling

“It is not a question of choosing one and thereby rejecting the other; both are necessary in order to do justice to the totality... This is perhaps simply shown by Dr Douglas Spanner's example of the boiling kettle. Why, I may ask, is the kettle boiling? There are two kinds of answer that can be given. One is, it is boiling because energy is being supplied to it in the form of heat and the maximum vapour pressure of the water is now equal to the atmospheric pressure. The other kind of answer which may be given is that the kettle is boiling because I put it on to make a cup of tea. Now these are different answers, the first in terms of immediate causes and the second in terms of ultimate cause. But both are true, both are complementary and not competitive. One answer is appropriate within a particular frame of reference, the other within another frame of reference. There is a sense in which each is incomplete without the other.”
  • Source: Frank H. T. Rhodes in the essay “Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe”, included in the book “Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe and Other Essays” edited by Donald M. MacKay, published by Inter-Varsity Press, Chicago, Illinois, in 1965.

Bertrand_Russell

Scientific Method Complicated and Simple

“Scientific method, although in its more refined forms it may seem complicated, is in essence remarkably simply. It consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question. The two stages, first of observation, and second of inference to a law, are both essential, and each is susceptible of almost indefinite refinement.”
  • Source: Bertrand Russell (1931), In The Scientific Outlook (1931, 2009), 3.

Coherence

“It is said that the mark of falsehood is failure to cohere in the body of our beliefs, and that it is the essence of a truth to form part of the completely rounded system which is The Truth.”
  • Source: Bertrand Russell, (1912), In the book entitled “The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell. Second edition published in 1998 (originally published in 1912) by Oxford University Press, Oxford, England. Chapter 12. ISBN 978-0-19-285423-0. Online at <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5827> retrieved 2022.

Herbert_Simon

Artificial Intelligence Satisfice

“The alternative methods provided by AI, most often in the form of heuristic search (selective search using rules of thumb), find decisions that are 'good enough', that satisfice.”

Shannon_Vallor

AI Data

“Only a modest subset of what is representable in digital form can be generated or stored in sufficient quantity and quality to be useful... An event that only happens once in a generation, or to one person in a billion, even if it is world-altering, is virtually invisible to a machine learning model.”
  • Source: From the book “The AI Mirror” by Shannon Vallor. Published 2024 by Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0197759066. Chapter 2, page 48.

E_O_Wilson

Self-Knowledge

“Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.”
  • Source: Chapter 4 (Emergence). On Human Nature (1978). On Human Nature; written by Edward O. Wilson; first edition; published in 1978 by Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0674634411.

Israel_Zangwill

Democracy

“I recognize that Democracy is the least bad form of government. It is, of course, peculiarly liable to be exploited by demagogues, who, instead of uplifting the masses, use them as a means for lifting themselves up. But whereas there is no way of correcting a maleficent autocracy save by smashing it, a maleficent Democracy contains the cure for its own evils. For the people has a sound instinct in the long run.”
  • Source: Israel Zangwill. A speech. Address delivered before The American Jewish Congress, Carnegie Hall, New York City, October 14, 1923-10-14. Transcript published by The American Jewish Congress, New York. Entitled “Watchman, What of the Night?”.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Divergence of Interests

“Taylor had believed that the transcendent logic of science, together with easier work and better, more fairly determined wages, could integrate the worker into the organization and inspire a zest for production. Instead, the forms of work organization that emerged with scientific management tended to amplify the divergence of interests between management and workers.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 45. ISBN:0465032125.

Information and Automating

“To the extent that technology is used only to intensify the automaticity of work, it can reduce skill levels and dampen the urge toward more participatory and decentralized forms of management... However, this approach cannot exploit the unique power of an informating technology. In contrast, an approach to technology deployment that emphasizes its informating capacity uses technology to do far more than routinize, fragment, or eliminate jobs. It uses the new technology to increase the intellectual content of work at virtually every organizational level, as the ability to decipher explicit information and make decisions informed by that understanding becomes broadly distributed among organizational members.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 243. ISBN:0465032125.

The Panopticon

“The Panopticon was an architectural innovation developed by the moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In Foucault's view, it is both a sign of and metaphor for this new disciplinary society. Bentham extolled the Panopticon as a technological triumph capable of exploiting the productive potential of those who had flouted, thwarted, or otherwise escaped social authority. His initial targets were convicts and paupers, though he did not fail to see the potential usefulness of the Panopticon for students, asylum inmates, and workers. The architectural plan conceived by Bentham was first constructed by his brother Samuel, an engineer, in 1787 for a factory at Critchef in Russia. It was later adapted to the problems of housing convicts and paupers. The structure consisted of a twelve-sided polygon formed in iron and sheathed in glass in order to create the effect of what Bentham called 'universal transparency.' A central tower, pierced with wide windows, opened onto the inner wall of the surrounding polygonal structure, which itself was divided into narrow cells extending across the width of the building. Each cell had a window on both the inner and outer walls, allowing light to cross it and illuminate all the inhabitants to an observer in the central tower, while that observer could not be seen from any one of the cells. Mirrors were fixed around the tower to direct extra light into these apartments.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 320. ISBN:0465032125.